The world can finally see a court case that will fortunately set guidelines for the punishment of BitTorrent users in the future. In Sweden, a 26 year-old guy has luckily escaped a court hearing with little more than a tap on the wrist. The IFPI has tracked a file-sharer who uploaded 44 songs online, and accused him of copyright infringement. The court hearing was held last week, resulting in a punishment of just $311.

BitTorrent users in the U.S. got used to see huge fines being handed down to the file-sharers like Joel Tenenbaum or Jammie Thomas-Rasset. After considerable legal wrangling, the defendants were demanded to pay damages of $67,500 and $1.5m accordingly, which is, of course, astonishing money for essentially insignificant file-sharing offenses.

However, another interesting case was heard last week in a Swedish court. The IFPI launched a file-sharing copyright infringement case against a guy who had been caught last year sharing 44 songs online. In fact, this is 20 tracks more than the 24 that were shared by Thomas-Rasset and 13 tracks more than those shared by Joel Tenenbaum.

This time, a young man from Uppsala, a city located near the capital Stockholm, was also found guilty of copyright infringement. However, the big difference was the rate of the damages he is now demanded to pay. Honestly, that punishment won’t please the entertainment industry.

Unlike Joel Tenenbaum and Jammie Thomas-Rasset, who now face damages of $2,177 and $62,500 per each shared song respectively, the Swedish defendant faced more realistic outcome. Despite the judge’s initial request to set an amount equivalent to $45 per each shared song, finally the amount was dropped to $7, which makes total payable damage for uploading 44 songs just $311.

The court ruling was welcomed by Rick Falkvinge, the Pirate Party founder, who also expressed a hope that the Swedish courts are finally coming to their senses towards non-commercial infringement of the copyright monopoly. This decision, Falkvinge believes, is in stark contrast to the ruling handed over in the Pirate Bay trial, where the tracker’s 4 founders were sentenced to long prison sentences plus damages of over $4,500,000 for facilitating sharing 33 files.

Hopefully, the recent court ruling will set guidelines for financial penalties in future copyright cases.

first off 7 USD is still way to much a song seeing as most are only $.99 on I tunes and that is what apple charges after they have bought a license to sell them. Lets get to actual cost, real actual cost. They wont because then they would have no reason to chase anyone.